The fragile steps toward a child's understanding that lying, stealing,
cheating and hurting are out of bounds.

by Sharon Begley and Claudia Kalb

To the legal system, the answer is clear: children have the requisite
moral sense--the ability to tell right from wrong--by age 7 to 15, depending
on which state they live in, and so can be held responsible for their
actions. The Roman Catholic Church pegs it at the early end of that range:
children reach the "age of reason" by the tender age of 7, a milestone
marked by their first confession of sin and holy communion. Developmental
psychologists and other researchers who study the question are not so sure.
How old a child must be to both know in his mind and feel in his heart that
lying, stealing, cheating, hurting--let alone murdering--are morally wrong
is a matter of scientific debate.

But the question of when is not nearly so fraught as the question of how.
Although they pretty much agree that living in a crack house--with people
who respond to challenges with violence, and bereft of parental love,
supervision and models of moral behavior--can leave a child's conscience
stillborn, scientists are struggling toward a definitive answer to the
question of how children develop a sense of right and wrong. "If there is
any consensus, it is that conscience is a combination of head, heart and
hand," says Marvin Berkowitz, professor of character development at the
University of Missouri, St. Louis. "It is knowing the good, loving the good
and doing the good. And that requires both cognitive and emotional
components."

The emotional piece falls into place first. "All children are born with a
running start on the path to moral development," says psychologist William
Damon of Stanford University. The reason is that empathy, the key emotion
supporting a sense of right and wrong, emerges early and, it seems,
naturally. Babies cry in response to the wails of other babies, "and not
just because it's a sound that upsets them," notes Carolyn Zahn-Waxler of
the National Institute of Mental Health. "They cry more in response to human
cries than to other aversive sounds. Somehow, there's a built-in capacity to
respond to the needs of others." Babies as young as 1 try to console others
in distress. Toddlers offer their security blanket to a teary-eyed parent or
a favorite toy to a distraught sibling, as if understanding that the very
object that brings them comfort will do the same to another.

Although there seems to be some heritable component to empathy--identical
twins, who have identical genes, show more similarity in their response to
others' distress than fraternal twins do--it can be twisted, warped or
crushed like a fragile sprout. Empathy means, at heart, the ability to
respond to another's distress in a way more appropriate to her situation
than to your own. "The development of empathy has a lot to do with how
children experience emotions and how people respond to their emotional
states," argues Berkowitz. "It's not automatic." If a child's sadness is met
with stony silence rather than a hug, if her loneliness is met with
continued abandonment, then she is in danger of losing her natural empathy.
Kids who, as 14-month-olds, exhibit high levels of empathy typically become
less empathetic after only six months if they live in homes filled with
conflict, and if they seldom feel a mother's love, finds Zahn-Waxler.

The other emotional ingredients of conscience are that quaint pair, guilt
and shame. Although some child advocates insist that no child should ever be
shamed, scientists who study moral development disagree. "Guilt and shame
are part of conscience," says Berkowitz. In young children, the sense of
right and wrong is born of the feeling that you have disappointed someone
you love, usually your parents. If there is no one whose love you need,
whose disapproval breaks your heart, you are missing a crucial source of the
emotions that add up to knowing right from wrong and acting on it.

Important as emotions are in the development of conscience, the heart can
falter without the head. The very thought of shooting a little girl inspires
in most people a profound feeling of horror. But feelings can fail us when
we face more ambiguous moral choices, such as whether it is right to help a
struggling friend cheat on a test. Much as children pass through stages of
cognitive reasoning, so they pass through six stages of moral reasoning. In
the model developed by the late Lawrence Kohlberg and still accepted today,
children's first glimmer of conscience comes in the form of thinking, "I
won't do this; Mommy will punish me if I do." That gives way to a positive
spin: "I won't do this bad thing, because I want a reward for being good."
Both forms of reasoning at this early stage, which roughly coincides with
toddlerhood, turn on self-interest. But most preschoolers also grasp and
believe in abstract ideas like fairness and reciprocity. When asked, as part
of an experiment, how to distribute a pile of toys or a box of cookies to a
group of children, many respond with explanations such as "We should all get
the same," reports Stanford's Damon.

Also in the early years, roughly until 6 or 7, "most children make moral
judgments on the basis of the damage done," says David Elkind, professor of
child development at Tufts University. They condemn the child who broke
three glasses while helping Mom load the dishwasher more than the child who
broke one glass while playing with the good crystal. But after the age of 7
or 8, children begin to make judgments based on intent: they know that
smashing the Waterford while using it as a Barbie pool will land them in
more trouble than shattering an entire place setting while clearing the
table.

By middle childhood, if all goes well, children begin to seek social
approval. This shows up as "I won't do this because I want people to like
me," and then "I won't do this because it is against the law." By 8,
children generally understand that retaliation is wrong, and their brain's
so-called judgment circuit, centered in the prefrontal cortex, approaches
maturity. In the final stage, one that even many adults fall short of,
abstract ideals guide moral reasoning. Ideally, the adolescent recognizes a
social contract ("I won't do it because I am obliged not to") and something
like universal rights ("I won't do this because it is simply wrong").

The age at which a child reaches these milestones of moral reasoning
varies with how he is raised and how those around him act. Unlike empathy,
full-fledged conscience does not seem innate. Children acquire the cognitive
understanding of right and wrong by observing the behavior of the people
most important to them, usually (and hopefully) their parents. If Dad reacts
to injured pride--"He dissed me!"--with violence, that becomes the model for
his son. And that is only the beginning of a parent's influence.

Different styles of parenting seem to nourish, or beat down, a child's
nascent conscience. Both autocratic and permissive parenting, although they
seem like opposites, tend to shape the same behavior and attitudes in
children. Children of permissive parents often struggle to learn the limits
of acceptable behavior. They typically develop poor self-control, perhaps
because anything-goes parenting conveys the message that none is needed.
Autocratic parenting says that the course of control is outside the
child--namely, parents--so there is no need to develop an inner moral
compass.

Sitting in the sensible middle is "authoritative" parenting that, say
numerous studies, nurtures a child's respect for rules. Authoritative means
setting firm limits, letting your child know your views of right and wrong,
but "explaining instead of forcing," says Berkowitz. Authoritative falls
short of the "do it because I say so!" autocratic school of parenting. For
that reason, many cultural conservatives blame authoritative parenting for
everything from kids who kill to gangsta rap, but authoritative does not
mean permissive. It does not mean negotiating over whether a 12-year-old can
leave the house at 9 p.m. clutching a six-pack. And it does not mean trying
to lay out the fine points of retributive justice to a 2-year-old who just
shoved the playmate who "pushed me first!" But parents who explain their
moral reasoning provide a model their child can emulate. "If you want a kid
who respects and cares about others," says Berkowitz, "you have to first
give him respect and show that you care about him."

The community, too, shapes a child's conscience. It will come as no
surprise to parents that children have built-in hypocrisy detectors. ("But
Mommy, if it's wrong to lie, why did you tell her she looked beautiful?") If
the football coach preaches winning above all, and if Mom lies to get her
child excused from class in order to take another day of vacation, and if
Dad reams out a teacher who reprimanded his daughter for cheating, "children
learn not to take moral messages seriously," says Damon.

Heart and head will take a child only so far, however. "I suspect that if
you sat down [the first-grade shooter] when he was quiet and calm, before
this happened, and asked, 'Is it bad to shoot someone?' he would have said
yes," says psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and director
of a MacArthur Foundation program on juvenile justice. How much he
understood about the consequences of shooting and the finality of death is
unknown. But choosing not to undertake a horrific act requires the third
ingredient of conscience: a gut-wrenching aversion to wrong. "Gut-wrenching"
is not merely a figure of speech: it means the racing heart, sweaty palms
and churning stomach that moral individuals would feel if forced to, say,
burglarize a house. Some people simply lack this stress response, but
probably not because of a genetic defect. When Adrian Raine of the
University of Southern California recorded how 15-year-olds' heart rates,
EEGs (a measure of brain activity) and other factors changed in response to
stress, he found some cool customers who were not fazed by anything.
Compared with kids with a normal stress response, they had a greater chance
of being criminals at the age of 24. Perhaps low arousability makes kids
seek out excitement and danger, Raine suggests. Or maybe it makes them
fearless. "Kids who come from a bad home environment, who are battered from
pillar to post, may become inoculated to stress," says Raine. "Their nervous
system may simply not be wired to ring a warning bell" when they are about
to do something dangerous--or wrong. This brain wiring may be what's missing
in kids who "know" right from wrong but fail to act on it.

When do the heart, the head and the gut come together to produce, if not
a moral philosopher, at least a moral child? "My hunch is that it's probably
not complete until a child is close to 12," says Steinberg. "But a lot of
these things are still developing at 15." And sometimes, as any glance at
the headlines will tell you, they fail to develop at all.